


Kingdoms Come

by Dhobi ki Kutti (dhobikikutti)



Category: CS Lewis - Chronicles of Narnia
Genre: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:Lorna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-24
Updated: 2006-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhobikikutti/pseuds/Dhobi%20ki%20Kutti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time passes. And Caspian and Lucy live. And the world turns.</p><p>Spoilers for all seven books.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kingdoms Come

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Lorna in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge  
> Thanks to Boniblithe and Naad for beta-ing this in record time.
> 
> All dates have been taken from [C.S. Lewis's timeline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narnian_timeline). This contradicts some of the information in the books (especially in The Dawn Treader), but it's not like Lewis was much for internal consistency anyway.

#### 2290\. Narnian Calendar.

 

He had been swimming, for an eternity.

 

He had been warm, and floating, and rocking.

 

He had been dancing to his mother's heartbeat.

 

He had been home... but now he was being pushed, and squeezed, and then his home rushed away from him, it crumpled around him and then was ripped away, and he blinked his eyes and harsh light stabbed at him. Something swung him by his ankles and slapped his bottom and the world around him was utterly different and new and terrifying. He wailed, an action he had had no cause to do, never having experienced such displacement and homesickness before, and he heard voices around him, strangely sharp and amplified. He felt something rough and dry scratch him all over, taking away the last of the slick warmth on his skin, leaving him cold and braised. Then something soft and smooth twisted around him, smothering his body so that he could no longer swim, weighting his arms and legs so that they wrapped motionless at his sides.

 

"It's a boy, your Majesty". Finally everything was quiet; he felt tension in the air that he was learning to breathe in.

 

"Oh, _mercy_."

 

Finally a familiar sound, this was her, the voice he had heard most often, the only one that had resonated inside his home, ripping the water he swam in. There was fear in this voice, and sorrow and love and heartache and terror, and he heard it and felt more of the familiar warmth around him ripping away.

 

He felt himself being handed to her, placed into arms that smelt like home, listening to the wild thump of a heartbeat that was no longer the all-pervasive echo it had once been.

 

"What will happen to us now, oh, my poor sweet babe... oh, if only I could go home!"

 

He felt the arms around him trembling, the feeling of fear swirling around him. Soon he would be taken away and placed against a strange woman's breast, to drink milk and then fall asleep as news of `a tragic accident' involving the king and the king's brother spread like a plague throughout the castle. When he woke, he would be called only Caspian because the father he was to share the name with was dead, and his mother a feverish, imprisoned `guest' in his aunt's quarters. It would be five days before he felt at home again, in the arms of the nurse who would sing to him rather than the mother who would stand stony-faced staring out of her window at the land that killed her husband and would soon orphan her child.

 

But now, he stirred, restless and uncomfortable, as drops of water, warm and smooth, trickled down from his mother's skin onto his face. They tasted like home.

* * *

 

#### 1932\. Gregorian Calendar.

 

She had smiled.

 

She had listened to the sound of her mother's voice, and the deeper rumble of her father's, and the high-pitched chatter of her brothers and sister.

 

She had waited.

 

And now a hand was reaching in and lifting her up, water dripping from her as she blinked into the light. There was so much colour around her! Before there had been the brighter and darker blue-black of the quiet she had waited in, but now there was light reflecting off of the metal surgical instruments and shining from the electric lamps and radiating from the eyes of the nurse who cooed over her, "Ooh, she's a precious little ducksie, isn't she, poppet?"

 

She was washed and cleaned and dried and warmed and dressed and cuddled, and through it all she watched bright-eyed and wondering, waiting for this wonderful world of colour and sound to take her home.

 

She felt motion, and a change of air, there was less blood and more antiseptic in the air. And then she heard her father's voice claiming her, loving her, imprinting itself forever as the sound she loved the most in this world.

 

Later there would be other voices. Voices associated with hovering faces above her cradle and nervous, excited hands gingerly touching her face, voices that always overlapped and interrupted each other:

 

"Oh, _Mo_ther! She's perfectly beautiful!"

 

"Why is it so small?"

 

"Can we name her Esmeralda?"

 

"Ma-Ma. _I'm_ your baby. MA-MA!"

 

"When will she start talking?"

 

"Oh, look, look, she smiled at me, oh Mother, can I hold her?"

 

"She's not cross-eyed, is she?"

 

"I'm so glad it's a girl! Now we all match up."

 

"Why doesn't her hair look like my dolly's?"

 

"If I kiss her, I shan't hurt her, shall I?"

 

"Oh, Mother. I love her."

 

But she waited now, waited while her father paced beside the nurse holding her, frowning as he heard his two-year-old son wake up in the middle of the night and cry Ma-Ma. She waited as the doctor washed his hands and said, "She's awake now, Mr. Pevensie", and heard her father's eager footsteps hasten away. She waited while the nurse walked from the nursery to the bedroom, until she was placed between her mother's shoulders and her father's arms, their breath mingling over her head.

 

"Oh my darling, my precious little baby, oh Dear... isn't she the most wonderful thing in the world?"

 

She heard her mother's voice and her father's voice and her mother's heartbeat and her father's heartbeat and took one last look at the beautiful colourful world she had entered. Then she smiled and went to sleep in her mother's arms, as peacefully as she would ten days later when the minister would drop a spoonful of cool water on her forehead.

 

She smiled at her home.

* * *

 

#### 2298\. Narnian Calendar.

 

He had not cried at three, when Nurse had sat him on her knee, and told him quietly that Her Majesty the Queen, his dear mother who was living far away to the West in _her_ mama's house, was dead. He had squirmed impatiently when at four, Nurse told him that his uncle was now going to be called His Majesty the King, and his aunt was now the Queen. But now, at eight, when he was set down by the gentleman-in-waiting inside his nursery and Nurse was rushed out without even being able to stop and hand him a handkerchief, let alone ask him why he was crying and take him on her knee and give him a lump of sugar, he burst into a new storm of tears. He had tried to control himself in front of his Uncle and the gentlemen-in-waiting, but now, with no one in the room to care, he flung himself across his high, narrow bed, and proceeded to kick his bedcovers with his boots.

 

When he woke up four hours later, he found his boots were still on and the curtains still undrawn and his napkin still folded on his supper tray. Nurse would never have let him keep his boots on, and she drew the curtains as soon as the sun set. And she would have made him get up for supper as soon as the serving girl brought it in. She would have unfolded his napkin and tucked it under his chin, and then she would have told him how in the old days Brave King Peter and his brother and sisters fought a terrible battle and became kings and queens and ruled the whole of Narnia without ever crying or wearing their boots to bed or behaving like silly children even though they were almost the same age as Caspian.

 

Caspian scowled at his supper tray and thought that it was easy for Brave King Peter to come from some magical faraway world without any frowning uncles or sniffing aunts and with a load of brothers and sisters to back him up and a lion who showed up whenever things really got scary. And who had talking trees and talking bears and talking giants in his army! Caspian thought that anybody could be brave when they had all that. And now he was expected to be brave all on his own, without even Nurse to teach him how.

 

That night as Caspian went to bed without Nurse's familiar creaking bedtime sounds around him, he wondered what it would be like to wake up in Peter's world, with Edmund and Susan and Lucy all around him, and lots of wonderful adventures to have that all ended happily. Maybe the animals still talked in Peter's world. Maybe there would be flying horses in the stables and mermaids in the pond, and maybe he would come up with a clever, wonderful plan to rescue all of them from a dragon that would make Peter clap him on the back admiringly and Edmund cheer and Susan smile, and Lucy would give him a hug, and say, "Oh, I wasn't scared a bit because I knew you would take care of us." Or maybe, maybe in Peter's world Peter had a mother and father who would smile at Caspian and say, "Don't worry, son, we'll take care of you." Did children with parents need to be brave?

 

Without Nurse, the castle seemed unfriendly and cold. He wondered if he would feel more at home in that strange town in the West where Nurse had said his mother's people lived. But there was no one there now, he remembered Nurse telling him about Uncle Belisar and Uncle Uvilas, who were his mother's cousins, and had died even before she had. Nurse never talked much about his mother to him; Caspian thought it was because his mother must have hated him so much that she left him behind and never came back for him. And now Nurse had left him too. Caspian wondered what he would do if Uncle left him. If everyone in the whole castle left, and he was all alone, with the suits of armour and the tapestries and the treasury.

 

Caspian decided that he would much rather have a family than a castle for himself. He put his cold supper tray in the waiting room, and snuck down the back stairs till he found the cook's tortoiseshell mouser. Picking the cat up, he walked back to bed. In the dark, the cat's eyes gleamed yellow at him. "You are Aslan," he told Minnie, "and I am Peter the Brave's strongest knight. And in the morning, we will go outside and have a royal ball with Queen Susan and Queen Lucy and all the talking trees."

 

In his dreams, Caspian turned Minnie's purring into Nurse's lullaby.

* * *

 

#### 1940\. Gregorian Calendar.

 

She had fallen asleep in church when she was three, and she had fidgeted when she was five, but when she was seven, she held her father's hand as they crossed the street and stepped into the grand cathedral. Her father had taken each of them on their own for a special outing; Edmund had gone to the zoo, and Peter had gone to the British Museum, and Father had taken Susan out for real tea at a shop where the ladies took your coat for you and the waiters held your chair. But she had asked Father to take her to someplace beautiful, and he had brought her to St. Paul's. As they walked under the great dome, he told how as a boy he had come here with his school and they had all got a whipping for trying to see who could make the loudest echo.

 

Father didn't walk up to the alter; instead he sat down in a pew towards the back and listened to the organ rehearsing while she walked up and down, looking at the carvings and pictures. After a while she came and sat beside him. He told her that she would be going away soon, with Peter and Susan and Edmund, to a lovely place in the country where there would be beautiful trees and gardens and maybe even a stream nearby.

 

"Is it because of the war?" She asked. A lot of things had started changing at home, like Cook's 12-egg cake recipes, and the parlour maid's Young Man's weekly visits, and the smile on Mother's face, and Lucy had heard them being blamed on the war.

 

Father told her it was, and that he and Mother wanted to make sure they were safe and that they were not to worry about him or Mother because both of them were going to be very busy doing things to help the war get over quickly so that everyone could come back home soon. And meanwhile, they would all have a jolly holiday, just the four of them, a real adventure away from the grown-ups. Wouldn't that be fun?

 

She nodded. If Father said it was going to be fun, it would be. She had never thought of a church when she asked to go some place beautiful, and he had found it for her anyway, hadn't he? When Father got up and said, "Let's see if I can show you one more special thing," she skipped up the many many stairs that he led her to. At the very top, they stood under the big dome, now so much closer and grander than from below. Lucy put her hand on the railing and stared up. Father let go of her hand and told her to walk around the gallery. "And when you get as far as you possibly can," he said, smiling, "put your ear against the wall and close your eyes."

 

She started walking away, looking over her shoulder to see Father getting smaller and smaller. When she realised she had gone around more than halfway and was getting closer, she walked back, and stood for a moment, looked across to him. He said something, but she couldn't hear it, and she shook her head anxiously, starting to run to him. He gestured, and she stopped, looking at him once to make sure he wasn't calling her, before closing her eyes and pressing her cheek against the wall.

 

"Lucy, can you hear me?"

 

Father's voice was right next to her, as though he was whispering in her ear. Startled, Lucy opened her eyes, but he was still standing across the space, his back to her, close to the wall. "Lucy?"

 

Astonished, she put her mouth against the wall and whispered back, "Father? Is it magic?"

 

There was a smile in Father's voice when he whispered back, "I thought it was too, when I was your age. And then I thought, if we can hear through stone, why do we need the telegraph at all?"

 

She laughed in delight as they whispered back and forth. Father growled like a lion and she shivered excitedly, before trying to whisper-baa back like a lamb. It seemed easier to talk to Father like this, the way she would talk to Susan under the covers, after bedtime. She could even ask, "Father? Are you... are you scared? About the war, I mean?"

 

It took Father so long to reply that she opened her eyes and looked at him. She saw his shoulders curved in towards the wall, one hand pressed up against it, the other folded in somewhere against his chest. As she watched him, she heard his voice right inside her.

 

"Sweetheart, I am often nervous about the outcome of the war, and anxious about everyone I care for. But I believe that if I am doing what is right, and if I am brave enough to only be afraid of doing wrong, then... then it will be right. Even if I don't understand how."

 

Lucy nodded. Father _wasn't_ scared, which meant he was right, which meant they would go and have a grand adventure in the country and come back and everything would be alright.

 

"I love you, Father", she whispered against the wall, watching his back as it straightened up.

 

"My dearest child. Even when you cannot see me or feel me, remember that I will always love you."

 

Father must have got something in his eye, because when Lucy started running back across the curved gallery towards him, she saw him rubbing his sleeve across his face. But he had got it out by the time she reached, because as she rushed into his arms, he caught her up, and swung her, laughing, spinning around with the circle of the dome twirling above her head.

 

That night, when Peter and Edmund came to the girls' bedroom and started talking about eva-q-a-shun and gas masks and being billeted, she looked at them and said, "Everything will be fine."

 

In her dreams, Lucy smiled.

* * *

 

#### 2303\. Narnian Calendar.

 

The day before the defeated Telmarines had been invited to the Fords of Beruna, the fourth day after the Battle; King Caspian the Tenth fell in love. The problem was that he had heard of love either from courtly ballads that extolled chivalrous devotion, or from a collection of erotic Calormene poems illustrated by woodcuts that his uncle had probably not known existed in the castle's library, or from the talk of kitchen maids, or from Nurse. Caspian couldn't quite categorise his feelings to match any of these examples.

 

Caspian fell in love with Edmund when Edmund marched into his room, shook him awake, and got him astride a horse before Caspian was half awake. As soon as they started galloping, Caspian woke up rather rapidly. Peter had been drilling him every morning the last three days, patiently trying to pass on the knowledge of years of royal diplomacy and warfare. In the evening Peter would train him in sword fighting, pointing out that he could teach him moves that would suit his undersized, man-boy's body. Rising up and down the saddle as they rode, Caspian could feel every bruise on his skin and strained muscle in his body. When Edmund finally drew to a halt at the river's edge, Caspian dismounted rather stiffly.

 

"Do you know what that star is called?" Edmund asked.

 

Caspian looked up at the sky, blinking as the vast array of sparkling objects above him. He couldn't even tell which one Edmund was pointing at. He tried to remember some of the names Professor Cornelius has thrown at him during their `astronomy' lessons, but decided that the better part of valour lay in shaking his head and looking sheepish. Edmund smiled.

 

"Neither do I. I'd wager that Lucy could tell you the name of every single Narnian star that's been named, and Peter probably remembers the important ones, but I never did remember them all too well the first time I was here either."

 

Caspian blinked. King Edmund the Just had ridden him out at midnight to the Bridge, no, the Fords of Beruna, to talk about stars? Edmund pulled Caspian down to the grass, it had not yet become damp with dew, and it tickled his fingers.

 

"The first year I was sent away to school, all my teachers knew me as Peter's brother. So did half the boys. That summer, when we came to Narnia, after we became kings and queens, I did my best to make sure everybody in Narnia knew me before they knew Peter. Oh, don't be an ass, I don't mean in a disloyal way. Just that I would talk to the scullery maids and the tiniest squirrel baby and the oldest overgrown dryad and every last dwarf grandmother and try to fit in. I wanted to prove to Aslan and everybody else that I loved Narnia, and was sorry I had betrayed it."

 

Caspian stared. Nurse had only fleetingly told this story, and the first private moment she had got, she had warned him about his manners and to not bring up subjects precisely such as the one Edmund was so casually referring to.

 

"... and the point is, Caspian, old chap, that none of us can. Be Peter, that is. Or like him. And the best thing that Narnia taught me was that I didn't even actually want to. Did you know Peter adds up accounts in his head and on his fingers just to make sure he's right?"

 

Caspian couldn't help it; the picture of the High King--Peter--counting on his fingers make him giggle. Edmund grinned at him. "And he walks in his sleep at night if a door's been left unlocked and--all in his sleep, mind you--locks it. And he can't remember a train timetable to save his life. I can, but neither of us is any good at trig. Luckily for us, when we were kings, we always had centaurs around to help us with calculations."

 

"Trig?" Caspian ventured, having understood the vague concept of a train from his previous conversations with their Majesties about what they were doing before they were summoned to Narnia. Edmund waved his hand. "Beastly math stuff that can drive a fellow starkers. Be glad you only have to learn swordsmanship. My point is..."

 

Edmund leaned on his elbows, watching the moon sparkle off the river water. "My point is that we walk in here, heroes from another age, and Peter wins your battle and Aslan conquers your enemies, and then suddenly you're a king and you have no idea what to do. Except--" and Edmund pointed at Caspian, "You do. You've been brought up for this from the day you were born, and even if Miraz was a pill, he still made sure you knew the basics. And you have a court and an army and people who all know what to do and how to help you do it. They probably had four thrones in Cair Paravel because they knew one of us alone would botch the affair up. You'll be fine."

 

Caspian looked at Edmund in the dark, and in the shadowed outline of moonlight, he looked... just like a boy. Any normal boy, like Caspian himself. A boy one might even, perhaps, call... "Ed..." A boy who gave him a friendly shove at the name, which led to an even more enthusiastic shove back, and soon the two were breathless and laughing, brushing grass off of their clothes as they stood up.

 

As they walked to their horses, they saw the pale statue of a lion motionless in front of them. Aslan turned his head, and the alabaster turned to gold. Caspian stood aside, shy, and Edmund dropped in front of Aslan and slipped his hands underneath one of those massive, velvety paws. Boy and lion shared a look, and then Edmund, looking over his shoulder at Caspian, said softly, "Don't you see? That's the point. It wasn't about being a king or about Narnia, it was about _me_. Did you think Aslan only talked to me about the White Witch?"

 

And then Edmund gathered the reins of both the horses, and headed back towards the castle.

 

That night, as Caspian watched the sun rise over the river, for the first time, he realised that the lion beside him cared about _him_. Not Caspian the Tenth, King of Narnia, Emperor of the Lone Islands and Lord of Cair Paravel, but him, the thirteen-year-old boy who half wished he could go back with Edmund and Peter and Susan and Lucy and continue having adventures with them.

 

The next morning, he fell in love with Susan.

 

Susan told Peter to let Caspian sleep as long as he needed to, and after finally he got dressed, she let him eat (a very late) breakfast in peace, before quietly asking him whether he would like to spend some time with her. Of course he agreed. Susan (Queen Susan) was the prettiest girl (woman, Queen) whom he had seen. And then, when she took him into the ballroom and started talking to him practically, about all the things that people were going to expect from him as a young king, he realised that there were some conversations he could never have with Nurse, then or ever.

 

"I'm cramming a dozen years' information into one day, Caspian, I'm sorry," Susan said, as she stepped with him across the empty floor. She was demonstrating how to dance with a centaur. "Some of these things I probably shouldn't even be talking about at your age."

 

"I'm the same age as you are," Caspian muttered, having the grace to add, "Your Majesty" as he caught her eye. She looked down and swallowed, and said, so softly he could barely hear it, "I know."

 

Then she looked beyond him and said, "But I have lived the fairy tale past the ending, and so I know some things that you do not."

 

And then she kissed him. Once a Queen of Narnia, always a Queen of Narnia, Caspian realised, as his virgin lips trembled with the assured, loving, powerful kiss of a Queen. When she drew back, there was a look in her eyes that made Caspian understand the stories of why Rabadash the Ridiculous went to war for her. "Someday, you might have need of that, _Your_ Majesty," she smiled, and the sorrowful affection in her voice startled him.

 

And then Lucy danced in, and the Queen turned back into the "Su" who would "oh, teach him how to do the faun's wedding dance, remember, like Mr. Tumnus taught us?"

 

They danced and laughed and shared silly stories about Bacchus's bacchanalias until luncheon.

 

And then in the evening, as they gathered on the roof of the Great Tower, just the five of them, because Edmund jokingly suggested that Caspian needed an astronomy lesson, and Peter affably agreed, Caspian decided fall in love with Lucy.

 

He came to this conclusion over the course of the night, as he listened to her name, indeed, every single star, and tell every single story behind their names. When Aslan walked in, everyone had fallen silent, and Caspian sensed their happiness more than saw it. Susan turned her face towards him like a flower to the sun, though she did not move from the solitary turret she had placed herself in since she arrived. Peter and Edmund jumped off of the walls they had been perched on, and sat on the floor, on either side of the lion. But Lucy pulled Caspian by the hand and knelt between Aslan's front paws, throwing her arms around his neck as she nuzzled his mane.

 

Caspian sat very still. He could feel the warmth from Aslan's breath, and though he didn't dare touch him, Lucy's impetuous tug caused the edge of his arm to barely brush the feather-rough fur of Aslan's forepaw. He hoped Aslan wouldn't notice. If he never moved, he could have stayed like this forever. Lucy's golden curls spilled over Aslan's paws as she nestled between them, smiling up with the sort of look that Caspian would have liked to give Aslan, had he not felt so ill-equipped to demonstrate love.

 

Susan had talked about heirs. If Caspian married Lucy, then they would all stay, and be his brothers and sister, and even if they left Narnia he could go with them. And Lucy was younger than he was, so he wouldn't feel scared to kiss her. At that moment, Aslan's tail twitched, and Caspian realised that he had been thinking about the High King's sister who was at that very moment asleep against the lion's chest, and he wondered if Aslan would ask everyone to leave before he shredded Caspian into teeny tiny pieces.

 

Aslan bumped his great head against Caspian, who found himself sprawled against Aslan's flank. A rumbling vibration reached his back before it reached his ears.

 

"Can you give me the name of that star, Son of Adam?" And when Caspian raised his guilty eyes, at first all he saw were the twin stars of Aslan's own. Then he managed to look in the direction Aslan indicated, and knit his eyebrows, because he could find no star there at all.

 

"Ah, but there was, once, and a fallen star might still have a future," Aslan said, and was there subterranean laughter in that molten growl?

 

Caspian fell asleep to the sound of that breath, and when he woke up in the morning, in his own bed, he found one single golden strand of hair clutched in his hand. He wondered if he could be forgiven for not knowing whether it was Aslan's or Lucy's.

 

When Aslan announced that Caspian came from the same world as the other Children, and opened a door that led back to it, Caspian kept his eyes on the gold of Aslan's mane, and tried not to look at the glaring green and blue that he could glimpse through the door, or the grey beyond it into which the gold of Lucy's hair disappeared.

 

After the last Telmarine was gone Caspian took a breath, and looked around, at the clear Narnian sky and the sunny green Narnian earth and the diverse furred and feathered Narnian people about him.

 

"King of Narnia," Aslan said gently, and Caspian knelt, and buried his face into the warm, welcoming mane, just for a moment, so that his subjects would not see his tears.

* * *

 

#### 1944\. Gregorian Calendar.

 

The day that Lucy finally came home, she became a woman.

 

She had been away from it for so long. For a whole year she had stayed on at Professor Kirke's house, learning her lessons at the village school along with other out-of-place evacuees. Mother refused to leave Father alone in London, and refused, equally vehemently, to have her children anywhere near the target of the Blitz. The boys and Susan went off to schools equipped with gas masks and air raid shelters, but Lucy had had to entertain herself, and it hurt, knowing that the Wardrobe was so close, but Narnia still impossibly far. Sometimes she would go and sit inside it anyway, rubbing her face against the soft fur and pretending it was warm and golden, instead of cold and brown. Professor Kirke found her there, once, and after tea that evening he told her the story of how he had gone to Narnia with a girl called Polly, and seen other worlds, besides.

 

"But how can you not go back, when you still have the rings?" she had cried. Professor Kirke had wrinkled his eyebrows and replied, "I find this world quite as enthralling as any other, young lady."

 

And after that, he kept her busy every evening after school, reading Shakespeare and the Odyssey and Beowulf and other fat, difficult books that she found she could read because they reminded her of the way she used to talk when she was a queen in Narnia. When she finally got together with Peter and Susan and Edmund again, she found that she remembered the most about Narnia. The rest of them seemed more interested in exploring the rocks and coves of the seaside village where Mother had taken a cottage for the summer, hosting Lucy's cousin Eustace and her aunt Alberta as well as two evacuees from Birmingham. Father was still away in London doing important work for the war, and when he came up for the weekend before they all had to leave for school, it was too noisy and crowded and short to be able to tell him about Narnia, or Aslan, or anything, really.

 

And then after that first year of school, Lucy and Edmund had to go to Cambridge because it was safer than London without even getting a chance to go meet Father and Mother, and say goodbye before they left for America. She didn't get to see Peter either, who wrote brief, distracted letters from Professor Kirke's, that talked more about the wonderful discussions he was having about Anti-Semitism and Platonic ideals and Civil Disobedience. Susan wrote too, but her letters were long and excited, all about the wonderful cities in America and how quickly the war would be won now that they were a part of it. After they came back from Narnia, Lucy asked Edmund whether he had written about their journey to Peter and Susan, and he said, "No, they've both got other things to worry about, and besides, why rub their noses in it?"

 

Lucy still wanted to tell them about it, and the first two weeks of school she waited impatiently for Susan to finally come back. When she managed to catch Susan, who was sitting in a corner of the Common Room with an American movie magazine, she started in with a rush--about how the Lone Islands had changed, and Eustace and the dragon, and Reepicheep, and the funny odd Dufflepuds. Susan listened quietly, without asking any questions, until Lucy noticed that the expression on her sister's face was very similar to the one in the picture in the Magician's Book.

 

"I... I'm sorry you couldn't come," Lucy trailed off, awkwardly, "But I hope America was fun." Lucy had been about to say, "I wish you could have been there", but she realised suddenly that it wouldn't be very truthful. She had _enjoyed_ being on her own with only the boys, and no other Queen of Narnia for anyone to compare her with.

 

"It was!" Susan said brightly. "And I had a ship adventure of my own. When Father was lecturing at the Navy headquarters in Cape Cod, we visited one of their submarines. The Naval officer who escorted us danced with me afterwards at the reception they had organised for Father." Susan paused. "And how was Caspian? Did you get a chance to teach him some more dancing?"

 

Lucy shook her head. She hadn't talked much about Caspian since she came back, not even with Edmund, and now she didn't want to. "We were on a ship," she pointed out. "And besides, he's grown up now. He probably knows more Narnian dances than I do."

 

"How old was he, this time?"

 

"Sixteen." That was older than Peter was right now. But it hadn't felt like it, at all. He had seemed young, oh, manly enough to be a king, certainly, but that was how everyone became in Narnia, she and Edmund and even Eustace in the end, though he was a year younger than her even. And it hadn't been because she was Queen Lucy, the way Drinian and the rest of the sailors and even Reepicheep thought of her as. Caspian had called her Lucy, and laughed at her along with Edmund and Eustace, but she had never felt like a child with him, the way Susan, and even Peter made her feel at times. And they had been... friends. She had even been able to tell him about the Magician's Book, and how she had eavesdropped on Marjorie and Anne.

 

Caspian had laughed and said, "Well, in that case, Lucy, you had much better stay here in Narnia for the rest of your days, where you have a hundred friends with nothing but loving praise for you and knights like myself perfectly able to defend you as the most beautiful girl in the world even without any magician's spell." Lucy had blinked at him, feeling shy for the first time, but then he had pulled her closer and given her shoulder a friendly nudge with his own, before resuming their old game of naming the stars by looking at their reflection in the water. Some days she still beat him, but he had spent the past three years catching up with and going beyond her own familiarity with Narnian stars.

 

"How old is the boy you danced with?" Lucy asked, after a while, since Susan didn't seem to want to say anything about Narnia.

 

Susan kept flipping through her magazine as she replied, "He was eighteen when we danced. Now he's dead. The U-Boats sank his ship five weeks after."

 

"Oh. I'm sorry, Susan." Lucy didn't know what else to say, and when Susan just shrugged and kept on pretending to read, she got up and wandered away. It had been the same after Lucy came back home from Archenland after the battle, and found Susan uninterested in talking about Tashbaan or Rabadash, or, for that matter, Peter's fight with the giants in the North. Lucy found it easier to try to leave both Susan and Marjorie Preston alone, and retreat to the library in search of new worlds she could escape to.

 

That winter, Lucy got a letter from Eustace saying that he and some girl called Jill had gone back to Narnia and had an adventure too long to write about and that Caspian had even come back with them for a few minutes, and now all sorts of things were happening at school.

 

That whole winter Lucy had clung to the delight of that knowledge. She had written to her Mother to ask if she could go to Eustace's again for the summer, if she could not come home, and Mother had agreed. Peter and Edmund had joined them at Cambridge, and Jill was there too, since Aunt Alberta didn't seem to think it odd that the friend Eustace asked home for the holidays was a girl.

 

Lucy kept waiting for Eustace to bring up Narnia, but he seemed more interested in tagging along behind Peter and listening to him talk seriously about politics and democracy and the war. And Jill spent most of her time with the Girl Guides she had joined. So finally, one night, when Lucy and Susan and Jill were all in bed, she asked Jill what had happened. It seemed easier, somehow, to talk about it in the dark, without having to look at anyone's face, or at the picture of the Dawn Treader that still hung across her bed.

 

Jill started out from the beginning, proving herself a much better storyteller than Eustace had ever been, and when she got to the part about "this old white haired chap who Eustace realised later on was King Caspian," Lucy flinched. Jill kept going on and on, talking about Puddleglum this and Rilian that, but all Lucy could really see was Caspian, all his golden hair turned white, who had married the star's daughter after all, and had a baby with her. Then finally Jill reached the end and said, "And then we went back to our rooms and took off our Narnian things, and I suppose Aslan must have fixed the wall again, because when the police arrived it was just as though it had never been knocked down." Jill got up and went to the night stand for a drink of water because she had been talking for quite a while.

 

Lucy said, "Thank you for telling us," very politely, and closed her eyes so that Jill would think that she was tired and had gone to sleep. But after a while, just when she thought she couldn't bear it, she felt her mattress dip, and then Susan was there, her arms around her, stroking her hair as she cried.

 

"He's dead, Su... he and Aslan both came here, they came to our world, and they didn't see us, and now he's..." Lucy hiccupped, and Susan held her closer, and murmured, "Oh, Lucy... hush. I know."

 

The next day she had told Edmund and Peter, and both the boys had gone quiet for a moment, and Peter had given her a hug, and Ed had buried his hands in his pocket and scuffed his shoes against the wall and then gone off to talk to Eustace. But Lucy had gone to the bottom of the garden with Jill and talked to her about Aslan's country, where Caspian was now. She spent the rest of that summer helping Jill practise archery to earn her Girl Guides badge. Susan came a couple of times, but when Jill said, "I hope this comes in handy the next time I have to fight," Susan turned her back on them and walked inside, tossing over her shoulder, "You could die tomorrow from a bomb on your head."

 

That year at school, Lucy wrote to Father and told him she was old enough to be in a battlefield. If she could live with the risk he was taking, she said, then so could he. Lucy didn't know if her letter helped, or whether it was just that the war seemed closer to getting done. But that summer, the year she was about to turn twelve, she and Susan got on a train and reached London, where the boys, whose school had let out a day earlier, met them. They took a bus home, and Lucy thought that it was because she had been away for four years that she didn't remember the way, until they arrived, and she suddenly remembered Mother writing to them while they were still at Professor Kirke's about being bombed out and having to take a little flat somewhere.

 

When they went inside, everyone exclaimed about all the old, familiar things--the purple teapot with an elephant's trunk for a handle, and the china dogs on the mantle, and the looking glass with a crack from the time Edmund had knocked a cricket ball into it. But to Lucy, it all looked terribly, horribly different. Her lovely pink-wallpapered room with the rocking horse was gone and so was Cook and the parlour maid and the nursery, and instead, she was to share a narrow, white-painted room with Susan that overlooked a dingy alley. Lucy didn't eat a thing at tea, and when Father came back from work that night, she hung back in the hall instead of leaping forward and throwing her arms about his neck. Even he had changed; he looked tired and anxious, and Peter was taller and broader than him.

 

That night, Lucy woke up to find blood on her sheets. Susan took her to Mother, who smiled and sighed and commented about both her girls growing up so early. Susan helped her change the sheets and fetched her a hot water bottle. "It means you can have babies, someday, when you get married," she smiled.

 

"Did... do you remember this happening to us in Narnia?" Lucy asked. Susan glanced at her. "Don't you remember me telling you we couldn't stay girls forever?" she said quietly. "Kings and Queens, especially, have heirs to produce."

 

Lucy sucked in a breath as she thought about Caspian and Ramandu's daughter having Rilian, and then dying and going to Aslan's country. She shuddered. "How can you even think about boys and babies, and all that... that rot!" she cried, "How can you forget about Aslan?"

 

Susan tossed her head. "He didn't let me have them in that world, did he? He said I was too grown up to go back. So I jolly well mean to make the most of my life here! Just because I'm not a queen anymore doesn't mean I can't still have fun. And I'd rather have a husband and some dear little babies and a home of my own than keep going off to wars. I hate war!"

 

Susan started crying then, as an air raid siren began wailing around them. Lucy pulled down the blackout curtains and held Susan's hand as they went down into the cellar. In the dark, Lucy whispered, "Just think, Su, someday we'll find a way out of here, and we'll go to Aslan's country on top of the mountain," but Susan snapped, "I don't want to go anywhere! I just want all of us to stay together and make it through this blasted war and be able to go to sleep at night without worrying about who's going to die the next morning."

 

Lucy felt Mother reach out and pull Susan close to her. Peter and Edmund were on either side of Father. Lucy felt the neighbour's tabby cat winding around her feet. She picked it up and bent her face towards it, so that when Father shone his torch on her, he wouldn't see her crying. "Coming home has been quite an adventure, hasn't it, Lu?" Peter called out cheerily, because he could see that Mother looked anxious.

 

Lucy made sure her tears had dried before she looked up and nodded.

* * *

 

#### 2356\. Narnian Calendar.

 

After Aslan mended the wall, Caspian found himself back on the mountain. Aslan was gone, so he started walking along the stream. At first he walked downstream, but then he came to the edge of the cliff. As he looked down, he wondered what would happen if he jumped. He did not know how long he stood there, but the sky turned darker and darker, and soon the sun had set and the moon shone crescent in the sky. And then Caspian looked up, and saw the stars, and he smiled, because he recognised only one of them.

 

She came down to him, or he stepped off the cliff up to her, and they both smiled at each other. Then they looked down, and through a window, they watched Rilian sleeping with a whole parliament of owls standing guard over him.

 

"I'm glad he avenged you," Caspian said.

 

"I'm glad you found each other," she replied.

 

Caspian heard a sound that made him think of starlight reflected on water, and they both turned to see Ramandu smiling at them.

 

"I'm sorry I never learnt your real name," Caspian said, after they had twinkled back at Ramandu.

 

"I am sorry that loving me led you to burn up your life faster than you would have, had you loved a mortal. I did not know that would happen, you know. I watched you grow old and I loved you from afar. Did you feel me?"

 

Caspian was about to shake his head sadly, but instead he said, "Maybe I did, on a night when I would have tossed and turned had you not soothed me to sleep."

 

She slipped her hand into his. "Would you like to meet my mother?" she asked.

 

"Yes." He answered. "And then I think I would like to meet mine."

 

Caspian was looking over the wall when Aslan came to him. He had met his parents, and his grandparents, and his Uncles Belisar and Uvilas, and Reepicheep and everyone, everyone else. He had kissed the star's daughter and watched her sparkle distantly in the sky. He had seen Rilian smile at a pretty Calormene tarkheena. He had visited Telmar and the South Sea islands and met the pirates who were his ancestors. He had observed their descendants being evacuated on an American warship so that the Navy could test some bombs on the island. Caspian had even learnt what a British Consul was.

 

Caspian was looking over the wall at Lucy, when Aslan came. Lucy was sitting quietly in St. Paul's Cathedral.

 

"Is she praying to you?" Caspian asked.

 

Aslan put his arm over Caspian's shoulder and he leaned over the wall. His hair was raven smooth in the wind, and his warm hand the bronze of Calormene.

 

"Does she know she doesn't need to?" Caspian asked after a while.

 

Aslan's robes were white, his halo golden.

 

"She misses the Lion," Caspian said, finally.

 

Aslan laughed.

 

"Come," he rumbled, as he bounded away on golden paws. "It is time."

* * *

 

#### 2555\. Narnian Calendar.

 

Lucy sat at the edge of the cliff. The stars shone above her. Aslan lay on his flank behind her, his shoulder supporting her back. She had curled her hands between his paws.

 

"Aslan."

 

"Dearheart."

 

Lucy smiled. "Nothing. I just wanted to say your name and know you were there to answer."

 

"And now do you know that I always have been?"

 

Lucy turned over and folded herself between his forelegs, winding her arms around his neck, burying her nose in his mane. "Now... now _I_ know... but..."

 

Aslan touched his nose to her cheek. "There is no longer time for fear here, beloved."

 

Lucy closed her eyes and pressed her face to his. She spoke into his ear as her hands kneaded his fur. "Oh, Aslan, _Aslan_. That's just it. I thought if I could have you for ever and ever, if I could find my way to you, I would have everything I love. You are my love, oh, Aslan, my dearest and my only. But... it's like the garden. Now that I've found my love, there's so much more. And I... I want to. Love more, I mean."

 

"Lucy. My love. Look at me."

 

Lucy looked into his golden eyes. Which darkened to playful pools of black. When she felt his hand upon hers, it was the blue of the monsoon clouds. A garland of flowers hung over his bare chest. His hands, like dark lotus blossoms, cupped her face. Lucy looked up at his face, at his eyes, at his mouth. She shook her head and bent her head into his palms. "I, I can't, Aslan, not like this."

 

She felt his kiss in her hair. "My child, there is room for everything in my world. You cannot love beyond me even if you tried. Look, now do you understand?"

 

Lucy looked up, and saw Caspian walking towards her. He held out his hand, and Lucy took it, letting him pull her up beside him to stand together at the edge of the cliff. Together, they looked through the clouds. Lucy felt Aslan's warm breath on their hands.

 

"It's Susan." She said finally, and the warm tongue that touched her wrist told her that everything she wanted to say had been said long ago. She turned around and smiled. "Once a Queen... Now I understand." Radiance lit her face like the sunrise. As she faced Caspian, she glanced at the stars. "Are you..."

 

He laughed, and stole the rest of her words with a kiss. "I'm not certain. I've been waiting."

 

They turned around, and saw grass, and trees, and night time shadows. Caspian laughed. Lucy smiled through her tears.

 

As they jumped from the cliff, the stars exploded in fireworks of joy.

* * *

 

#### 1950\. Gregorian Calendar.

 

They had swum together for an eternity.

 

They had smiled together, and waited.

 

They had loved their mother's heartbeat.

 

Now they were born, slipping out close to each other. In the window outside the hospital, the first summer flowers were blossoming.

 

Even before they could be cleaned, and weighed and blanketed, their mother reached for them. She held them tight to her breasts. Two pairs of eyes looked at her, blue as the summer sky, as the sea at the end of the world. Two fair heads crowned by gold the colour of sunrise, the colour of a tawny lion.

 

"They're a lovely pair, and no mistake," remarked the doctor, "And that was one of the easiest deliveries I've seen in a long time." She reached out for the boy. His mother clung to him for a moment, before releasing him. She touched the tip of her daughter's nose wonderingly. It was red, and wrinkled, and perfect.

 

"It's a brave thing, to have brought them into this world all by yourself," the doctor commented softly, as she laid the boy besides his mother and took up the girl. The doctor didn't want to pry, but it was rare for such a well-bred young lady to show up in a maternity ward without husband or engagement ring.

 

"It wasn't brave at all. They were what kept me alive."

 

Nine months, exactly, since the day she had mindlessly fucked one of the pretty boys who hung around her while a train she wouldn't hear about till six hours later jumped its tracks and crashed into the station platform. Eight months and twenty nine days since she dressed in black and received the mourners for five coffins--all closed because the remains would not bear looking at. Seven months and seventeen days since she was found standing outside the lion's cage at the London Zoo, with her arms hanging limply inside it. Seven months and two days since she ran away from the hospital and threw away her pills and stood on the docks, staring into the murky waters of what would eventually become the ocean. Seven months and one day since she realised she was pregnant. Six months and thirty days since she lay sleepless for a night beside the gravestones of her family. Six months and twenty six days since she bought a ticket to Cambridge, and comforted a bereaved aunt. Six months and thirteen days since she visited the similarly grieving parents of a girl she had once taught archery to, from whose cupboard she collected a silken courtly dress the parents never knew their daughter had owned. Five months and twenty days since she bought a cottage by the sea. Four months and two days since the voices in her dreams stopped being voices from her past, and changed to voices from her future. Three months and seven days since she woke up and didn't immediately think about her brothers and sister. Two months since she felt her children singing inside her. Less than one day since a lion held her hand and kissed her forehead as she clenched her teeth and waited for the ambulance to come.

 

And now they were here, and she would start counting her life forwards from this moment on.

 

"Have you decided what you're going to call them?" The doctor asked, as she turned off the light and tucked a blanket around her patients.

 

Their mother smiled, as she held their hands in hers. "I'm naming them after my parents," she said.

 

Adam and Eve Pevensie blinked up at their mother, and in the light of their eyes, she found her home.


End file.
